The Case of Comrade Tulayev

Victor Serge

Central Committee member Tulayev is shot outside his Moscow home
almost by accident, but his death results in three high profile
figures being arrested, given public show trials and then executed,
while the investigation draws hundreds of others into its net, as far
afield as Barcelona, Siberia, and Paris. Victor Serge's The Case of
Comrade Tulayev is a vivid study of the great purges and the workings
of Stalin's security system. It is also, despite a structure in which
the eight protagonists interact with the same minor characters rather
than with one another, a remarkably effective novel.

The story opens with a Dostoyevskian account of the background to
the murder, with two low-level functionaries who are neighbours in
a collective apartment. Romachkin, a clerk dealing with production
statistics, is concerned about justice in the abstract and is shocked
by the leadership's economic lies. The more spiritual Kostia, the young
communist representative on a construction site, is jarred into action by
the cynical scapegoating of one of his colleagues. Acting independently,
they bring together just the right combination of premeditation and
impulse to achieve the murder.

Successive chapters then introduce the central suspects, all of them loyal
both to the party and the state, and recount the events leading up to
their arrests. Promoted out of a more comfortable military career, High
Commissar Erchov is originally in charge of the case himself, allowing
us to see something of the security system's workings — with the fate
of Tulayev's poor chauffeur as an example. As he senses the foundations
falling away underneath him, Erchov faces his fate with resignation.

The Old Bolshevik Rublev is a historian and economist who is still
obsessed by theoretical issues, still trying to understand what is
happening in the Soviet Union intellectually. He discusses that and his
personal situation with his wife and, in a last clandestine meeting that
degenerates into a playful snowball fight, with two of his old friends,
all of them knowing they are likely to be arrested at any time.

Peasant turned revolutionary strongman turned bureaucrat Makeyev has
become a regional administrator, dealing without any subtlety with the
implementation of collectivization and production targets. He is not too
clever, comfortably ambitious, and loyal, but is swept up nevertheless
because he has had a personal disagreement with Tulayev.

The revolutionary organiser Kondratiev flies into Barcelona to write a
special report on the collapsing Spanish Republic for the Chief (as Stalin
is referred to throughout). As well as an incidental perspective on the
Spanish Civil War, we get here a cameo portrait of "left-deviationist"
Stefan Stern and his arrest. Kondratiev flies back to Moscow realising
his own downfall is imminent.

A chapter "Every Man Has His Own Way of Drowning" describes how the three
central suspects respond to interrogation — Erchov is resigned, Rublev
is stoic, and Makeyev goes to pieces — and are convinced in different
ways to provide the confessions needed for a show trial. We also get to
know their prosecutors and interrogators: Erchov's replacement Gordeyev,
the efficient Fleischmann, the unctuous Popov and the brutal Zvyeryeva.

When the prosecutors receive "an order to add to the dossier of the
Erchov-Makeyev-Rublev case (assassination of Comrade Tulayev) that of an
influential Trotskyist (which meant a genuine Trotskyist), whatever his
attitude might be", the system coughs up the ageing deportee Ryzhik, whom
prison and exile have somehow preserved from execution. He endures his
long journey back to Moscow and in the end manages to cheat the system.

Kondratiev also refuses to bow, determined to go down fighting.
He debates the meaning of his personal revolutionary history with Popov,
wanders the seedier areas of Moscow in the night, and gives a defiant
truth-telling speech in a provincial town. He is saved from execution
only by his personal friendship with Stalin, and goes into exile instead.

Some perspective is provided by Popov's idealistic daughter Xenia,
working in Paris. She attempts to raise awareness of Rublev's plight
in order to save him, but succeeds only in bringing down her father as
well as herself. (Serge himself was saved from execution and allowed
to leave the Soviet Union in 1936, after three years in prison, because
of international protests.)

The conclusion returns to the two characters with whom we started.
Romachkin has given up his concerns about justice and climbed a little
further up the bureaucratic ladder. Kostia has fled Moscow and sought
solace in agricultural work; he sends a letter confessing to the murder of
Tulayev, which the prosecutor Fleischmann burns before declaring the case
closed. In a short finale Fleischmann reads Rublev's prison notebooks,
which include a comment on his and his fellows' fate:

"We acquired a degree of lucidity and disinterestedness which
made both the old and new interests uneasy. It was impossible
for us to adapt ourselves to a phase of reaction; and as we
were in power, surrounded by a legend that was true, born of
our deeds, we were so dangerous that we had to be destroyed
beyond physical destruction, our corpses had to be surrounded
by a legend of treachery..."

In its breadth The Case of Comrade Tulayev is probably the most
ambitious novel of the Soviet purges. It is not directly historical,
mixing up details of the Kirov assassination and other events, combining
attributes of different people, and making no attempt at chronological
accuracy. Its setting is concrete, however, and Serge wrote from
firsthand experience, giving it a solid historical engagement and
making it fundamentally different to a work such as Darkness at Noon,
which drew on the same events but abstracted from them a few central
psychological themes.

Serge presents a splendid array of characters, with real historical and
psychological depth, giving a feel for how a wide variety of people
could fight so ardently for a cause, reconcile themselves to its
failings, and in some cases even sacrifice their reputations for it.
Their stories illuminate the purges and the atmosphere of paranoia and
fear those induced; their careers give us a view backwards over the
Russian Revolution and Civil War and the history of the Bolshevik party
and its internal struggles. And there are insightful glimpses of the
broader world of the Soviet Union in the late 1930s, its production
targets and collective farms but also its ordinary everyday life,
from the elite all the way down and out to the Moscow streets, the
tradition-bound peasantry, and indigenous Siberia.

The Case of Comrade Tulayev also conveys a strong sense of place,
whether it is Moscow in winter, the Caucasus where Erchov enjoys a final
holiday, the remote Ostyak fishing hamlet where Ryzhik is in exile,
the Paris summer enjoyed by Xenia, or the Ukrainian collective farm
where Kostia ends up. And it wouldn't be a serious Russian novel —
though it was written in French — without at least a little abstract
philosophising, in this case in the form of some of Rublev's ideas
on history and historical processes, which feel as if they must be
Serge's own.

The overall effect is a kind of "theme and variations", with stories of
fear and uncertainty and anxious expectation, arrest, and interrogation
taking their different courses. They are threads in the same system
and the same historical process, in which individuals are consumed by
the inexorable logic of the revolutionary state's drive for party unity.
The result is never, however, despondent or despairing: Serge has a faith
in humanity and its potential that can encompass even protagonists who
have themselves been torturers and killers, and for him the struggle
for human decency is inseparable from the political struggle.

Note: This 2004 New York Review Books edition includes a twenty-five page
introduction by Susan Sontag, which offers a mini-biography of Victor
Serge along with some observations on the novel. The date of Willard
R. Trask's translation is not given, but appears to be 1950; the French
original was published in 1949, following Serge's death in 1947.